Stockholm (HedgeNordic) – Malmö-based quantitative asset management firm OQAM, formerly known as iaib, has successfully launched a multi-strategy systematic hedge fund named ia. The three-month-old fund has now joined the Nordic Hedge Index (NHX).
ia employs a variety of proprietary quantitative models to achieve a four-fold objective. First, earn high long-term risk-adjusted returns. Second, produce positive absolute returns in a wide variety of market environments. Third, exhibit low correlation with global financial markets, and fourth, minimize drawdowns or downturns. The fund pursues both directional and relative-value systematic investment strategies. The group of directional strategies includes systematic trend-following strategies that aim to capture short-, medium-, and longer-term trends, as well as systematic asset allocation strategies. Systematic macro strategies, which seek to exploit market anomalies across asset classes, is one example of relative-value strategies employed by ia. The fund has no geographical limitations.
“We utilize human experience and knowledge to develop a constantly expanding portfolio of investment strategies,” Andreas Olsson, OQAM’s CEO tells HedgeNordic. These strategies are implemented using a systematic approach, which offers many benefits, one of them being that it removes human biases from the investment process. “Combining different investment strategies in an optimal way enables ia to deliver returns in a wide variety of market conditions (including falling markets). The aim is to create returns that are not dependent on how other assets perform,” Olsson adds.
The name OQAM (Occam; Quantitative; Asset; Management) derives from a problem-solving principle called Occam’s razor, which, in simple terms, infers that more simple solutions or assumptions are likely to be more accurate than complex ones. The Malmö-based firm specializing in quant-based investing was founded by Andreas Olsson, the firm’s chief executive officer, and chief investment officer Thorbjörn Wallentin. Before setting up OQAM, Olsson co-founded and managed Swedish hedge fund Stella Nova, while Wallentin worked as a quantitative trader and senior investment manager at Nordea.
“Throughout our careers, we’ve found that most investors are still dependent on rising markets. We believe they need to find other sources of returns than those offered by traditional long-only assets such as equities, bonds, and real estate,” says Thorbjörn Wallentin. “Typically, these types of returns can only be found in unconstrained investment strategies such as ours,” he concludes.
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